Samsung Odyssey 3D Review: This Glasses-Free 3D Monitor Can Impress, But Poor Games Support Kills It

For a moment, it seemed the very concept of 3D displays was dead and buried. Then, Samsung came along with a shovel under one arm and advanced eye-tracking technology under the other. Which brings us to the Samsung Odyssey 3D, a $2,000 27-inch monitor with one major feature: it does glasses-free 3D for gaming. I wanted to love it, but as you’ll see in this review, there just isn’t enough here to justify the price for anybody who has a mountain of cash to burn and a lingering adoration for the long-dead Nintendo 3DS.

I grew fond of the Odyssey 3D when I got to use it briefly last month. Having it in hand, it’s now obvious the monitor is constrained by issues both niggling and overt. Without the 3D effect, it’s a simple, though relatively colorful, 4K IPS LCD display with a max 165Hz refresh rate. You can find a quality monitor with those specs for under $500. However, Samsung’s new display houses a “light field display” that uses a lenticular lens to direct different images to each eye. The eye-tracking makes sure the lens is always showing the content to your face, no matter how you duck and weave in front of the screen.

All that means is the 3D effect offers surprising fidelity. If you remember the awkward viewing angles on earlier lenticular-based displays like the Nintendo 3DS, the tech inside Samsung’s monitor fixes the need for straight-on viewing, offering a unique gaming experience unlike any monitor I’ve used before. Still, the issues mount as soon as you plug it into your PC. The screen’s 3D requires special Reality Hub software you have to install yourself. You can find it either on the Microsoft Store or by digging through the downloads page on Samsung’s support site. This monitor does not support 3D movies, either. You can get a subtle 2D effect when watching YouTube or other non-copyrighted videos in full screen, but it’s not exactly the kind of experience you shell out $2,000 for.

There are a few other big caveats to Samsung’s monitor that go beyond its astronomical $2,000 price tag. You need an Nvidia RTX GPU to support the 3D effects. I tested the Odyssey 3D on a desktop PC with a GeForce RTX 5090, and I spotted no problems with framerates in the games I played with the additional 3D effects. Then again, many of these titles aren’t meant to push your GPU to the limit. The majority of them are cartoonish, kid-friendly games alongside several more stylized third-person action adventure titles. There are only 14 of them compatible with the Odyssey 3D at launch.

Although Samsung’s original list of games it supplied me included titles like Psychonauts 2, those are not available as of release. The 14 games supported on the Odyssey 3D: The First Berserker: Khazan, Lies of P, Stray, Dragonball Z: Kakarot, Little Nightmares II, F.I.S.T: Forged In Shadow Torch, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake, Wigmun, Disney Epic Mickey Rebrushed, The Smurfs Dreams, Palworld, and the three Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition titles.

Khazan is the only game built from the ground up with the Odyssey 3D in mind. Loading into it, you’ll find that the game’s cutscenes use the eye-trackingto give you a presence in the scene, as if you were peering through a window into the world as objects in the foreground shift around you. In-game, the 3D effect is sharp and—in many ways—engrossing. The characters and snowflakes pop off screen, though it’s subtle enough you won’t feel like you’re being punched in the face every time an arrow flies toward you. The 3D enhances the stylized, cell-shaded visuals, even if an odd artifact too close to the screen would occasionally make me feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic.

The problem is that most people likely don’t own the vast majority of the games supported by the Odyssey 3D, at least not all in one place. I have access to Palworld through Xbox Game Pass. Unfortunately, it seems that Samsung did not take the executable files from Microsoft’s subscription service into account. Reality Hub is supposed to detect any of these games on your PC, but the software failed to detect Palworld. When I manually entered the file path for Reality Hub to access the game, in this case the “gamelaunchhelper” file, it would launch the Palworld outside of Samsung’s launcher without any 3D effect. I’ve been in communication with Samsung about this issue, and it may change in the future.

I loaded up the side-scrolling beat-em-up F.I.S.T: Forged In Shadow Torch specifically to test just how much the 3D makes an impact on a non-3D action game. I pushed the 3D depth and 3D popout settings to their max to get any sense of the varying layers in the game’s relatively static environment. Even in its coolest moments, where enemies fly at the screen or you see the varying depth of foreground and background, it elicits the same kind of “wow, that’s neat” feeling of staring into an infinity mirror at a carnival. Inevitably, the novelty wears off quickly.

I’ve encountered other odd glitches, like the Odyssey 3D asking me if I wanted to overlay a 3D effect on a game running in 2D (this didn’t actually add a 3D effect). Other times, when using the subtle 3D effect on YouTube, clicking away would end the process of Reality Hub working in the background, which loaded an error message I needed to click away. But these issues are dwarfed simply by the lack of game support compared to this monitor’s price. It’s always hard to be the first of its kind, and early adopters of new tech will always pay more. The only hope is that Samsung adds more supported games in the future, though that may not be very likely considering how niche this monitor is.

The issue then is whether I can recommend what’s still barely more than a rough concept to anybody now, especially considering you can buy two high-quality 4K QD-OLED monitors for the price of one Odyssey 3D. I would love to see this monitor tech become more available, with broader support for more games and different options for resolution at a cheaper price. I just hope the Odyssey 3D doesn’t get dumped into a shallow grave like all the past attempts at 3D screens.